Today we’d like to introduce you to Melody Vo.
Hi Melody, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My love for baking and creating treats began when I was a child. I would proudly present my lopsided Betty Crocker mix cupcakes to my family members. They would be smeared with a generous amount of store-bought frosting and decorated with sprinkles from the previous holiday. In high school, my best friend and I would spend the evening after classes in her kitchen creating cake pops modeled after characters like Hello Kitty and Pikachu and other decadent treats like cupcakes and whoopie pies. We would then take our baked goods to school and sell them in our AP classes. That was my first taste of entrepreneurship and I’ve been addicted ever since!
I work in the Cyber Security industry and with my work being fully remote during COVID, I found that I had a lot more free time without commuting every day. I stumbled upon random baking shows on Netflix like Nailed It and Sugar Rush and I felt so much nostalgia for those months in high school where I ran a bakery out of my backpack. 2020 taught me that life could change at any moment, you never know what tomorrow will hold or if a global pandemic will happen and shut everything down. So why wait to chase your dreams? I started Love + Sugar last July with the expectation that I would probably just be doing orders for friends and family. I never expected to find such a huge amount of support and a community of other small business owners I now call my friends. My business pushes me to bring my very best self to the table every single day and I hope that I can continue serving the sweetest treats to my community!
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
It’s so funny to me that one of the comments I get most often is “you’re doing amazing” because, underneath the frosting and sprinkles, I’m in the kitchen panicking over every little detail while I’m whipping up orders. For me, I’m in uncharted territories, I’ve never been a business owner before and I am by no means a baker by trade or education. For me, growing up as a first-generation American the expectation is to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. I am none of the above and I will never fit that mold. I always get asked why I don’t open a business that is more professional or more lucrative. But getting to be creative every day feeds my soul, and that matters more to me. I don’t have a clear-cut path ahead of me in this business but I’m slowly learning that it’s okay to create your own path.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I work for a global cybersecurity company. I have been in technology sales for almost three years now and absolutely love my job. I am a D&I (Diversity and Inclusion) leader in my company and am part of leadership for our Asian employee network group, InnovAsian. I have lead webinars on Xenophobia at my company and as part of a speaker series for Tarrant County College. I am extremely proud of where I am in my professional career. In 2017, during my final year of college, I had wrapped of months and months of shadowing dentists and had realized that it was not my calling. My parents were not supportive at first of my pivot to Sales, but this career path has given me the opportunity to travel across the country for work and to work with leaders in my industry.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
Shortly after I started my business, a friend of a friend invited me to a stylized shoot. I pinpoint that shoot as the moment everything began coming together for Love + Sugar. I was able to connect with vendors I never would have had a chance to work with before and I still do collaborations with them to this day. Those connections have helped me grow my business in so many ways, without them, Love + Sugar would still be a small shop catering to just friends and family. There is so much power in community. Alone we can only impact what is directly around us, but when you build a community of business owners, you begin to create so much more.
You can find me on Instagram or Facebook. The best way to get in contact to place an order or do a collab is through insta @loveandsugarco_
Pricing:
- Treat Box $35
- Cocoa Bombs $4.5
- Custom Sugar Cookies starting at $36+
Contact Info:
Image Credits:
Maya Crawford Photography https://www.mcrawfordphotography.com/blog/qampas-with-me-maya-crawford
